Civil Rights Complaint Filed Against Illinois Schools For Using Cops To Handle Normal Discipline Issues

For a long time we’ve been pointing out just how dangerous it is to turn over school discipline problems to cops. Sure, there are reasons schools might need a police response to an incident, but putting cops on staff has allowed administrators to abdicate their duties and turn incidents that could be resolved by educators and parents into arrests, criminal charges, and — as is always the case when cops are involved — acts of brutality.

Cops in schools have arrested kids as young as five years old. In doing so, the only perceived obstacle is the tiny bodies, which are incapable of wearing handcuffs “properly.” Littering campuses with cops also means arresting parents for things their children have done, even when it’s nothing more than the normal creative expression expected from kids, like deploying finger guns or drawing a picture of a “bomb.”

When you turn discipline over to people who only see things in terms of criminal and non-criminal, problems arise. And when you turn this over to people in law enforcement, you also get the unadvertised add-ons: biased policing, casual violence, and a general disrespect for anyone who isn’t a cop.

It’s the biased policing that’s got the attention of two advocacy groups, who are now asking the federal government to investigate the use of “school resource officers” in Rockford, Illinois. As Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen report for ProPublica, there’s a very good chance civil rights are being violated on the regular by law enforcement’s interlopers.

In a 25-page complaint against Rockford Public Schools, filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center said that Rockford police officers have been “addressing minor behaviors that should be handled as an educational matter by parents, teachers, and school leaders — and not as a law enforcement matter by police officers.”

The complaint adds: “Black students bear the brunt of this harm.”

These students tend to bear the brunt of the harm everywhere, but it’s made much worse when you add law enforcement to the equation. In Rockford, black students make up about a third of the student body across all Rockford schools. But according to the allegations made in the civil rights complaint [PDF], it’s pretty much only black students being subjected to the worst aspects of RPS’ (Rockford Public Schools) agreement with local law enforcement to provide SROs (school resource officers).

RPS has an agreement with the Rockford Police Department and, as part of its zerotolerance approach to school discipline, routinely refers students to SROs for minor alleged violations of the Code of Conduct. When RPS staff refer students to SROs, SROs in RPS frequently issue municipal tickets.

The impact of RPS’s exclusionary tactics against students of color have repeatedly played out in weekly municipal hearings at Rockford City Hall, where RPS students and their families are subjected to exorbitant fines and forced to miss school. The MacArthur Justice Center and the National Center for Youth Law attended about a dozen municipal ordinance violation hearings to observe the results of student referrals. In the times we attended these hearings, the ticketed students were almost exclusively students of color.

That’s some of the anecdotal evidence. There’s more. The complaint details the hassling of a black female student by an SRO because he claimed he had received a report of smoking in the bathroom. He also claimed the student was the only person in the bathroom at the time of the report, which was clearly false. She and her black friend were the only people subjected to a search. When she questioned the officer about being singled out, she received this response:

“Grow the [f***] up and stop acting like a little brat.”

That’s the level of professionalism we’ve come to expect from police officers when any aspect of their police work is questioned by a civilian. When that questioner is a minor, officers have even less to fear in terms of reprisal, so it can get much worse for those forced to deal with officers alone while on campus.

It’s not just the in-school cops, though. There’s evidence school administrators are aiding and abetting the biased treatment of Rockford students.

[A] Black student from Auburn High School was expelled for over one year (March 4, 2022 to June 4, 2023) over a Category 4 Fighting violation, despite evidence that the student was not at fault: multiple other students reported that the disciplined student had not instigated the altercation, the student who started the altercation admitted to doing so, video footage revealed that the disciplined student had tried to avoid the altercation, and a teacher was on the scene yet chose not to intervene for seven minutes.

That’s insane. And, somehow, it gets worse:

The teacher on scene did not provide a report, and the administrator’s reporting of the incident was inconsistent with multiple statements of witnesses who were present during the altercation. Further, when the initial administrator assigned to the case suggested a less exclusionary punishment for the student—a four-day out-of-school suspension—the administrator was removed from the case and replaced with another. The student was bullied and assaulted first, yet not only did Auburn High School staff fail to intervene, they implemented extraordinarily punitive disciplinary actions against the student.

Again, all anecdotal. But in support of the statistics, which indicate there’s definitely a civil rights problem in Rockford that needs to be looked at by the US Department of Education:

In RPS, a substantial difference has existed for years in the comparison between Black student representation in the student population and Black student representation among those who are referred to SROs for minor school disciplinary matters. In the 2021-2022 school year, Black students represented 31.38% of the student population, yet received 53.1% of referrals to SROs, a 22-point difference. In the 2022-2023 school year, Black students represented 31.03% of the student population and received 54.7% of referrals to SROs, an almost 24-point difference. Similarly, in the 2023-2024 school year (until March 24, 2024), Black students represented 31.62% of the student population, but received 54.7% of referrals to SROs, again a 23-point difference.

And even though the report talks a lot about ticketing, it must be made clear this isn’t low-level stuff, even if the underlying “violations” historically were handled with detention, short suspensions, or just a meeting with parents. Some of these tickets issued to students carry fees as high as $750 per infraction. That’s crippling, especially for low-income students and their families.

This also isn’t a new problem for Rockford. As ProPublica points out, this district was hit with a federal desegregation order after it was discovered the district had been sending black and Latino students to lower-level classes. This didn’t happen decades ago, either. That order was issued in 2001.

Hopefully, the Department of Education will take a long, hard look at this, especially given the Rockford Public Schools’ problematic racial history. And if it does, hopefully it will encourage others to start asking hard questions about police involvement in normal school discipline issues. So far, this law enforcement experiment hasn’t worked out well for students or parents, especially if they’re not white and sitting well above the poverty line.